Born in Sài Gòn, Việt Nam in 1970, now living in the US as a claimed and renamed TRA

Supply and Demand

Another door may be closing on thousands of childless Americans eager to adopt from another country. The State Department has warned that it may shut down adoptions from Guatemala, where matching children with desperate foreigners is a profit-driven and largely unregulated enterprise.

Last year, Guatemala (population 12 million) was second only to China (population 1.3 billion) in the number of babies placed for adoption in the U.S. Americans took in 4,135 youngsters from Guatemala and 6,493 from China.

Foreign adoptions by U.S. families were down last year for the first time since 1992–but were up 8 percent from Guatemala. Several countries have clamped down on such adoptions because of worries about black-market babies. Beginning this year, China has said it will be much choosier about who can adopt, thanks to a decrease in the number of orphaned and abandoned children there. With few exceptions, parents must be under age 50 and married, with a high school diploma and an annual income of $30,000. Those who are obese or have a history of mental illness don’t qualify.

Would-be parents have increasingly turned to Guatemala, where waiting times are shorter and the supply of babies has ramped up to meet the demand. More than half the population lives in poverty, and some parents have been pressured by lawyers and other intermediaries to surrender their children for adoption to offer them a better life. Others are abducted or taken from their parents under false pretenses, and women have even been paid to get pregnant and give up their babies. It’s a safe bet those mothers are getting a small share of the $30,000 or more that such adoptions can bring. But it’s a lucrative business for the lawyers, baby brokers and others who facilitate the deals. The United Nations Children’s Fund estimates that it generates $150 million a year.

International adoption was largely unheard of until after World War II, when American families opened their homes to thousands of European orphans. Since then, successive waves of adoption have been generated by wars, as in Korea and Vietnam, or by political and social upheaval, as with the breakup of the former Soviet Union. In the beginning, most adoptive families already had children and were motivated by humanitarian or religious goals. Today, the overwhelming majority are infertile couples or singles who long for a child.

Concerns about children being treated as a commodity led to the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoptions, an international pact set forth in 1995. If the U.S. ratifies it this year, as expected, adoptions from Guatemala will not be allowed until that country is in compliance with the convention’s guidelines–in particular a requirement that the government serve as a clearinghouse for adoptions.

Any new barriers are enormously frustrating for folks who ache for a baby, especially if those barriers seem to make it more difficult to rescue a child from poverty. But the rules are necessary to ensure that foreign adoption is about finding parents for kids who need them–not the other way around.

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4 Responses

There has been coverage in this very issue in Guatemala today on English Al Jazeera.

Aside from all this focus on foreign adoption, I think the real unanswered question is: why are there so many people with fertility problems these days? (I think that’s a big reason for the increase in adoptions).

This just makes me sick. We have created a monster in adoption. It is not at all about providing homes for children in need anymore. I got into a debate about this very thing with someone this week on my blog. I called adoption an infirtility supermarket and I truly believe that.

Safiya, good point. I read about this somewhere and they were basically saying it was due to women choosing to have children later in life. They were told by their doctors that their fertility wouldn’t be in danger in their 30’s which wasn’t necessarily the case. I imagine environmental factors and lifestyle contribute to it as well.

Mia, exactly but that’s hard to argue with people who view adoption as a win/win situation. Can you give me the link to the post? Sorry, I’ve been awful at keeping up with everyone’s blogs these last few weeks.